Scientists Want You to Track Ants in Your Neighborhood

Ants seem common and ubiquitous, especially at summertime picnics. But the names and types of ants crawling around city parks and streets are largely unknown to researchers.

The School of Ants project is recruiting ant-gathering citizen-scientists for help creating detailed lists and maps of ants living in urban areas, particularly around homes and schools.

“The diversity of ants, even around your home, is pretty high,” said Andrea Lucky, project leader and ant specialist at North Carolina State University. “They’re fairly charismatic, compared with other insects, and we don’t know that much about them.”

The researchers behind School of Ants hope the project will help students appreciate wildlife in their own backyards, while amassing an enormous data set.

“As a scientist going out on expeditions, I can only collect so much,” Lucky said.

Entomologists estimate that 30,000 species of ants exist worldwide. However, only about 12,500 species have been named and described. Even in the U.S., researchers are discovering new species. Chances are good that some fortunate school kids will be credited with finding new ants, said Lucky.

After signing up through the School of Ants website, participants receive a collecting kit in the mail. The kits come with collecting instructions and vials filled with Keebler Pecan Sandies: cookies that are an ideal ant bait, with an irresistible nutrient trifecta of fats, sugars and salts.

After collecting, participants preserve the ants by keeping them overnight in the freezer. They then mail them to Lucky and her colleagues, who identify the ants and let senders know what they found. The project is also building interactive Google ant maps, allowing people to search for and learn about the ants in their area.

Beyond simple documentation, the lists and maps will help agriculturalists, ecologists and climate scientists keep an eye on the movement of ant species and the changes in their diversity over time, Lucky said.

“If we can get good coverage, and lots of people and schoolkids collecting ants, we’re going to have the best range maps of urban ant species that have ever existed,” Lucky said. “They just don’t exist right now.”

The project began in mid-July and was overwhelmed by the number of kit requests. After ramping up operations, the project will start accepting new kit requests on September 1, in time for the start of the school year.